BatesLine

Flickr photo by Francisco Diez

Last Sunday was Pi Day, (3/14), and at 1:59 pm, MIT released its admission decisions for the class matriculating in 2010. ECs got to see the results Tuesday morning, and once again, some really bright, personable young men and women weren't offered admission. Many of those bright young people wasted their time in applying.

As some of you may know, I'm an alumnus of MIT, graduating with a bachelor's degree in 1986. (I don't say much about it -- I figure when you've been out of college for more than a decade, what you've done since graduation matters far more than where you went to school.)

My only ongoing involvement with the school is my work as a member of the MIT Educational Council, a group of hundreds of alumni worldwide who assist with the undergraduate admissions process. We serve as a local presence for the admissions office, and our main role is to interview applicants for admission. I've been an EC (as Educational Members are known) since 1987.

There are five ECs in northeastern Oklahoma. Gary Bracken '59, chairman of Ernest Wiemann Ironworks, is the current regional coordinator, responsible for managing the load of applicants among the alumni, making the arrangements when touring MIT admissions officials visit Tulsa (usually every other fall), and holding meet-and-greets for admitted students in the spring. (Gary was preceded in that role by John McGinley '52 and, before John, petroleum geologist Bob Rorschach '43, who interviewed me when I applied to MIT.)

The opinions presented here are my own, the description of admission processes and policies are my impressions and understandings, and they do not necessarily -- almost certainly do not -- represent the official views and policies of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. My use of the masculine form of the third person singular pronoun is in accordance with traditional English usage and is not meant to suggest that women are unwelcome at MIT. In fact, the sex ratio is nearly 50-50, a far cry from the 3:1 male-to-female ratio in my freshman class. Click this link for the official MIT admissions website.

Currently, I interview applicants from Bixby, Jenks, Cascia Hall, Holland Hall, Memorial, Hale, and Edison, but occasionally I'll pick up an interview from a different school if another alumnus is overloaded. This year I interviewed six applicants, including one from Azerbaijan. (That interview was conducted via Skype, which enables students in remote locations where there are no ECs a chance to meet with an alumnus.)

Via KFAQ's Pat Campbell's blog, here are videos from YouTube user FreedomsLighthouse with the opening five minutes of the speeches of Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck at the Take Our Country Back event at the Tulsa Convention Center.

I spoke at Wednesday's TMAPC public hearing on PLANiTULSA, Tulsa's first comprehensive plan in a generation. I haven't had time to write my thoughts on the event, but my friend Jamie Jamieson copied me on an email to a Pearl District neighborhood leader. He did a fine job describing yesterday's PLANiTULSA hearing at the TMAPC and analyzing the undercurrents among the special interest groups seeking to delay the process and dismember the plan. With his permission I'm publishing it here.

At the end of the meeting, the TMAPC decided not to end the public hearing, but to continue it until March 23, at 6 p.m. The public will again have the opportunity to speak, and comments may be also submitted online between now and the end of that meeting (unless the commissioners decide again to extend the time).

Let me underscore what Jamie says about the need for ordinary Tulsans to make your voices heard. If you participated in PLANiTULSA, in the citywide workshops, the small-area workshops, the survey, or some other way, if you want your input to matter, you need to express your support for the plan to the TMAPC.

I will be [unavailable for the March 23 meeting]. I delayed [an event] so that I could be present at and speak at yesterday's meeting, which I believed would be the last such hearing. As it was, so many people spoke - at length and to good purpose - that I didn't get to speak. It was a well-run hearing in that many people had their say and the Commissioners took time to engage closely with speakers in detail. The Commissioners handled it pretty well, particularly Bill Leighty and Liz Wright who both asked incisive questions. All the fog of misinformation circulated in recent days evaporated after a series of close questioning by BIll Leighty at the very outset of the hearing. I think it is imperative that the official voice of the Pearl District is heard, from the President at the next hearing. Christine [Booth] did very well, at short notice at the first hearing, and I spoke at that meeting too. We both sat through yesterday's 3.5 hour hearing, when we could have been doing our day jobs. We now need others to take up the slack.

It's starkly clear that the homebuilders, realtors and the Chamber, all of whom showed up to complain yesterday, are mounting a serious effort to torpedo key features of PLANiTULSA. They give the impression of having lain in wait for two years.

It looks as if the strategy is to drag out, obfuscate, confuse, conflate, alienate, discredit and ultimately emasculate the Plan to suit a myopic view of their own narrow interests, at the expense of Tulsa and Tulsans. A tactic in this is (i) to show up at the tail-end of the process when normal people have made their contribution to the process, and are at their day jobs, (ii) to gradually wear everyone else out to a point where no one else shows up except them, and (iii) to connive and lobby behind closed doors. They are now variously asking for a 60 or more days delay for their 'members' to consider PLANiTULSA's 200 pages. Never mind that everyone else has already read it. Perhaps - being charitable - they're just slow readers.

The Chamber, of which I am a long-time and slightly embarrassed member in particular made itself look hopelessly out of touch: it sent a new and floundering employee along to ask for a delay with the flimsiest of rationales. It seemed pretty clear that it's been 'got at' by the Home Builders, who merely succeeded in making the Chamber look stupid - to the extent that the audience laughed at the Chamber's first utterances. Their representative left early. 'Mission accomplished'. Engagement Over.

It seems to have escaped these organizations' notice that their respective, individual members are also Tulsans, who have had the opportunity to engage at any point in the last two years with PLANiTULSA. In fact many individual members such as I have actually done so. I am hoping that the Commissioners, who are an intelligent group of mature people, see through this for the sham - and shame - that it is.

While these respective groups have every right - and indeed duty - to speak at hearings, their seemingly calculated absence from the PLANiTULSA discussion process until the last minute is at best negligent, and at worst cynical, irresponsible and reprehensible. Up to 6,000 other Tulsans like them spent more than two years working on this project, as individuals. Now these organizations think they can come in and over-ride it at the last minute with a torrent of proposed corrections (most of which have actually been accommodated - almost to a fault - by the PLANiTULSA team).

An inspired, progressive, constructive, mature, public process is threatening to turn into a tedious yet predictable struggle of unimaginative, vested interests wishing to preserve a crumbling status quo (characterized by back-room deals, with scant regard to the real world) versus Tulsa's residents and the true interests of Tulsa and its economic and fiscal viability.

It's enough to make me want to move to Portland, along with everyone else under 30: the vocabulary there is about progress, adaptation to a radically changing world, innovation, new ideas. Our public policies here in contrast seem orientated around protecting the interests and personal feelings of a bunch of good ole boys whose time has... gone. The intellectual and policy high ground has transferred to the neighborhoods and to hitherto sidelined planners. Philanthropists and tax-payers meanwhile pay for the intellectual deficit - in hard cash.

So I trust you and other neighborhoods will show up and speak on March 23. Whilst the critics of PLANiTULSA were heavily out-numbered yesterday some opponents still haven't spoken, and will take up their right to do so at the next - and, I trust, final - hearing.

This is, sadly, a fight that in my view will determine whether Tulsa has much of a future.

As Jamie says, the hearing was very well handled. I felt I was heard. At many public hearings of this sort, the committee or board hears the speaker without response or interaction, and the speaker doesn't know how the members will process the information until the board discussion has begun, at which point there's no opportunity to clarify or rebut. After I spoke at Wednesday's hearing, however, a number of TMAPC members asked me questions that indicated they'd been paying attention and that gave me a chance to clarify and expand on my prepared comments. They did this for all the speakers, and that's why it seemed to take 20 minutes to hear each person, despite the 5 minute time limit.

As for the special interests asking for a delay and/or at the last minute requesting massive changes to the plan: These groups all were given a seat at the table. Home Builders Association executive VP Paul Kane and homebuilder Ken Klein were both members of the Citizens Advisory Team for PLANiTULSA, as was Al Unser, the head of the Greater Tulsa Association of Realtors, and Mike Neal, president and CEO of the Tulsa Metro Chamber. Many more people connected with the Chamber and the development industry were appointed by Mayor Taylor to those committees. (I was rather worried about it. I needn't have worried, apparently, as they opted not to participate actively. The two-tier distinction between advisers and partners was quickly collapsed into the single tier of the citizens team.)

These interest groups should have been following the process all the way through and should have raised their concerns earlier on, to be discussed by the Citizens Team. If they came to the meetings, they never seemed to have much to say. It's as if they thought it beneath their dignity to have their concerns aired amongst οἱ πολλοί. The concept of "Areas of Change and Stability," the issue that has the Home Builders Association upset, has been under discussion since spring 2009. It was included in the online background material for the "Which Way Tulsa" survey, issued in May, and it was in the draft Vision document issued on September 15, 2009.

Today is the final public hearing before the Tulsa Metropolitan Area Planning Commission for adoption of the PLANiTULSA vision and policy documents as Tulsa's first comprehensive plan in a generation. The hearing is in the City Council chambers today at 1:30, and I urge you either to attend and speak in support of the plan or send in a comment card for the TMAPC's consideration. Comments must be received before the close of the public hearing in order to be considered.

If you cannot appear in person, but would like to submit your testimony to the Planning Commission, please complete this online comment card or email your comments to planning@cityoftulsa.org and TMAPC@incog.org

PLANiTULSA supporters need to speak up. Elements of the developers' lobby in Tulsa are trying to strip away key components of the plan. These developers -- particularly the homebuilders -- object to the notion of "areas of stability" as it would appear to interfere with their ability to scrape midtown lots and turn leafy midtown neighborhoods into subdivisions full of Plano Palaces. (Here are the comments on the plan submitted Monday by Paul Kane, Home Builders Association of Greater Tulsa Executive Vice President.)

P. 75 of the land use chapter of the PLANiTULSA policy plan defines areas of stability and the kind of development the plan anticipates for such areas:

2.9 Establish criteria for identifying areas of stability. Define areas of stability as:

• Established neighborhoods
• High performing commercial and industrial areas
• Historic districts and areas with concentrations of historic structures

Planning/investment priorities for areas of stability include:

• Connectivity and streetscapes improvements


• Housing/neighborhood revitalization and rehabilitation programs


• Redevelopment of aging strip centers or corridors


• Small-scale infill that complements the character of the neighborhood and is consistent in form, scale, rhythm and proportion, as seen from the street

The developers also want to gut the small-area planning concept. PLANiTULSA proposes an extension of the sort of thing we're already doing (e.g. the Pearl District Plan, the Brookside Infill Plan), but the PLANiTULSA approach is to turn those plans, once they're complete and have been adopted, into zoning rules, so that a developer would be able to build something in accordance with the plan by right, rather than needing special TMAPC or BOA permission to proceed. This approach would make things much easier for developers in areas targeted for redevelopment, but the developers want things easier for themselves everywhere. The developers particularly don't want small-area planning applied to areas of stability, where the process could be used to develop design standards for infill redevelopment in established neighborhoods.

The developers' lobby strategy seems to be grounded in a legal theory that if the TMAPC takes elements out of the plan, the City Council can't put them back in. As seven of the nine city councilors were elected over the developers' lobby's objections, the TMAPC is their best shot at getting their way and blocking the council from adopting the complete plan. That's why it's important for ordinary Tulsans to have their voices heard by the TMAPC today.

While leaders of development and real estate organizations and prominent developers were appointed to the PLANiTULSA Citizens' Advisory Committee, they never seemed to participate in the give-and-take of the plan development process. I guess they thought they could swoop in at the last minute and have the TMAPC remake the plan to their liking.

Back in April 2006, I wrote a column in which I described five characteristics of an ideal land use planning and zoning system for Tulsa. Here are those five characteristics:

1. The aim of an ideal system would be to protect the investments of all property owners. That means homeowners as well as investors and developers.

2. My ideal system would be predictable. Before you invest in a piece of property you should be able to know with a high degree of certainty what you can and cannot do with your property and what your neighbors can and cannot do with theirs. If permission is dependent on the whim of city officials or on hiring a sufficiently expensive zoning attorney, the system isn't working as it should.

3. My ideal system would regulate what matters and leave the rest alone. Too often, our zoning code "protects" us against situations that really aren't problems, getting in the way of creative ideas that would enhance a neighborhood, while blithely permitting situations that are harmful to the neighborhood and the city as a whole. A good system allows as much freedom as possible, while not losing sight of the fact that what I do with my property affects the value of my neighbor's property.

4. My ideal system would accommodate a variety of neighborhood and development types in order to meet the variety of needs and interests in a city as big as Tulsa. There needs to be a place in Tulsa for an urban, densely developed downtown, as well as for big-box retail. There needs to be a place for both mixed-use, walkable neighborhoods where car-free living is possible, and for auto-oriented development with big-box stores and residential-only neighborhoods.

5. My ideal system would be clear and straightforward. The fewer and simpler the rules the better. Extra points for expressing those rules visually, to make it apparent to developers and homeowners alike what is allowed and what is not.

I support adoption of PLANiTULSA because, if adopted and if implemented, it will come close to creating the ideal system I outlined.

(Originally published 2010/02/26, bumped to the top for the benefit of my fellow guitar students.)

In the fall of 1989, shortly after we were married, my wife, who had been playing violin since elementary school, decided she'd like to learn some fiddle techniques. She found a teacher in Inola named Darrel Magee. (As it happens, I'm taking a beginning guitar course from Darrel this semester.)

Darrel was also the head of the country music program at Rogers State College in Claremore. RSC also had (still has) its own UHF station and a degree program in broadcasting. The two threads came together in a weekly program called Oklahoma Swingin' Country, with students running the cameras and in the control room.

Darrel invited my wife to participate in one of the broadcasts, and she spent many hours learning arrangements for familiar tunes like "Silver Bells," "Time Changes Everything," and "Steel Guitar Rag," and songs that were new to us then: "Big Beaver," "My Window Faces the South," "Milk Cow Blues."

The show was taped in Claremore on a Friday evening for later broadcast. I sat and watched from behind the cameras. Because of various camera and control room errors -- this was student practice, after all -- it took six hours to put together a 30-minute show. The awkwardness in some of the between-songs talk is partly because you're seeing the third or fourth take of what was originally a spontaneous intro. For example, "I'm going to sing first because I sure don't want to have to follow these other great singers," turned into, "I'm going to sing first because I don't want these other singers singing before me," on the take when the camera was in the right place.

For a small college TV show there was a lot of musical talent packed in the room, starting with singer Debbie Campbell and legendary guitarist Eldon Shamblin. I knew back then that Eldon was a Texas Playboy, but I didn't realize (as I do now) what a big deal he was, and Eldon was not the sort to make a big deal about himself. The video has some nice closeups of his solos and backup work on that old Stratocaster. Debbie, Tulsa's favorite female vocalist for many years, displayed her range on "Crazy" and "Me and Bobby McGee." (I'm still waiting for someone to post video of her Tulsa Tribune jingle.)

The rest of the lineup: Darrel Magee, piano; J. D. Walters, steel guitar; Suzanne Wooley, Mikki Bates, Rod Smith, fiddles; Jeannie Cahill, rhythm guitar; Ernie McCoy, drums; Jim Bates, bass. (Jim's no relation, as far as I know.) J. D. and Ernie have both played with the Texas Playboys at the annual Bob Wills Birthday bash at Cain's. Jeannie, Darrel, and Eldon joined Leon McAuliffe on his 1985 gospel album. And I'm pretty sure that was the same Rod Smith I saw performing last week in a classic country music revue in San Antonio.

OklahomaSwinginCountry-1989 from Michael Bates on Vimeo.

The Rogers State TV guys sent us a copy of the tape after it aired, and I got it converted to DVD not long ago.

Unfortunately, my wife's work schedule at American Airlines (Sabre) changed, and she wasn't able to continue with fiddle lessons. Two decades later, as our oldest son took up fiddle, she did too, and the two of them have gone to Jana Jae's annual fiddle camp and played with the local fiddle circle.

URGENT UPDATE: I've heard that Ms. Cobb sent an email blast that's generating some panicked comments attacking PLANiTULSA. If her email is as misinformative as her remarks to the TMAPC (see below), her influence will need to be countered by those who have actually read the PLANiTULSA policy plan and understand it. Your last opportunity to weigh in is tomorrow (March 10, 2010), at the TMAPC public hearing, beginning at 1:30. You can also fill in a comment card but it must be submitted before the TMAPC public hearing tomorrow in order to be considered by the TMAPC.

If you're wondering about the opposition to PLANiTULSA, Tulsa's first comprehensive plan update in a generation, here is one example, from the Feb. 23, 2010 TMAPC public hearing on the plan. Martha Thomas Cobb is a Realtor, and during her remarks to the TMAPC, she says that she tells her potential buyers that they can't remodel a house in a Historic Preservation zoning district without their neighbors' permission, and so the buyers decide they'd rather not buy houses in those districts. Therefore, in her view, overlay zoning and design guidelines are harmful to a neighborhood. She objects to the PLANiTULSA policy plan because of its advocacy of "areas of stability" where infill should be compatible with existing development.

Watch her comments for yourself in the TGOV video of the Feb. 23, 2010, TMAPC public hearing on PLANiTULSA. The key quote is about 1:20:36 into the video:

Swan Lake and North Maple Ridge are areas that have also added designations of preservation. As a Realtor, once I explain the fact that somebody cannot remodel without the plan being approved by their neighbors, unless they are happy with the house as it stands -- which nobody ever is when you're showing them property -- they choose other locations in town without this obstacle.

There are a couple of significant errors in her statement. In the first place, HP overlay zoning in Tulsa governs only what is visible from the street. You can remodel the interior of a home in an HP district to your heart's content without needing any special approval peculiar to the HP district. See Title 42, Chapter 10 A, for all the details, but here's the key provision, section 1053 C:

Within a Historic Preservation District, work, as defined in this Chapter, shall not commence unless a Certificate of Appropriateness has been first issued; provided however, that work related to the following shall not require a Certificate of Appropriateness:

1. Ordinary maintenance and repair which shall include the removal, installation, or replacement of guttering; the removal or replacement of roof covering with like material; and the application of any paint color to non-masonry surfaces.

2. Interior of buildings and structures.

3. Portions or parts of buildings, structures, or sites not visible from adjoining streets.

4. Accessory structures or buildings, such as storage sheds, garages, decks, patios, fencing, swimming pools and pool houses that are not part of the primary structure, provided however, such structures and buildings are not located in front yards.

5. Installation of radio or television antenna.

6. General landscape maintenance and planting of new organic materials.

7. Work required for temporary stablization of a building or structure due to damage.

And if you do want to change the exterior facade of the house, your neighbors don't have the power to veto it. Approval is handled by the Tulsa Preservation Commission and is granted or denied on the basis of clear standards in the zoning ordinances, and if you're not happy with the TPC's decision you can appeal it to the City Board of Adjustment.

The kind of design standards anticipated by the PLANiTULSA land use plan to define compatible infill would generally be less stringent than HP standards. From p. 33 of the land use chapter of the policy plan:

The Existing Residential Neighborhood category is intended to preserve and enhance Tulsa's existing single family neighborhoods. Development activities in these areas should be limited to the rehabilitation or improvement of existing homes, or small-scale infill that that complements the character of the neighborhood and is consistent in form, scale, rhythm and proportion as seen from the street.

But getting back to Cobb's comments: Suppose you owned a home in an HP district but had to sell it because your company was relocating you to another city. How would it make you feel, knowing that a Realtor was deterring buyers who were interested in your house with inaccurate comments about the impact of HP zoning on their ability to remodel the house? Those inaccurate comments might mean you're paying on two houses for several months more. I am not a lawyer, but I wonder whether such comments might be grounds for a tortious interference claim. I am not a Realtor either, but as a layman I would think that, at the very least, a Realtor who would let his personal prejudice against and/or misunderstanding of historic preservation overlay districts interfere with acting in the seller's interests could be at odds with state real estate regulations or the Realtor ethics code.

TMAPC member Phil Marshall, himself a Realtor and homebuilder as well as a past president of the Brookside Neighborhood Association, asked Cobb, "Do you find a lot of rundown homes in these areas [Swan Lake and North Maple Ridge]?" Her reply, "Yeah, pretty much." (Marshall's question seemed tongue-in-cheek to me.)

To the contrary, here's a heat map showing the value of recent home sales in the Tulsa area, with North Maple Ridge and Swan Lake right on the $250K border. A quick scan of Zillow for recent home sales show that most homes in these areas are going for around $100 per square foot or better. In Tulsa, that's an indication of strong demand.

The general thrust of Cobb's remarks were that overlay districts with design guidelines are a violation of a homeowner's constitutionally protected property rights. But every parcel in the city has restrictions on setback, lot coverage, height, and use. In an overlay district, those restrictions are customized.

Oklahoma City has had districts of this sort since 1981, governing both residential and commercial areas, including Bricktown and downtown. Wichita, Kansas City, Dallas, Fort Worth, Denver, San Antonio, Austin, St. Louis -- nearly all of our peer cities in this region and beyond have some type of land use district where design requirements for new development are customized to be compatible with existing development in a district. They go by many names -- overlay, conservation, special review, special use.

One more thing: Cobb said she didn't think there were real estate builders and brokers and attorneys involved in the PLANiTULSA process. In fact, representatives from the Home Builders Association and other real estate organizations, including Paul Kane, Executive Vice President of the Home Builders Association of Greater Tulsa, and Al Unser, CEO of the Greater Tulsa Association of Realtors, along with other prominent members of the real estate and development community (e.g. Bruce Bolzle of KMO, Ken Klein of Kleinco, and Paul Wilson of Twenty-First Properties) were members of the PLANiTULSA citizens' team that provided oversight and advice throughout the process.

MORE: If the name Martha Thomas Cobb seems familiar, I wrote about a mass email she sent prior to the 2008 city election that began "CALL YOUR NEIGHBORHOOD COUNCIL REPRESENTATIVE AND TELL THEM YOU ARE AGAINST MIDTOWN TULSA."

The Tulsa Police Department could be making better use of the internet and social media tools to communicate with the public, particularly in emergency situations. TPD has a blog, a Facebook fan page, and a Twitter account -- you've probably received the ominous email: Tulsa Police is now following you... -- but they aren't using any of them in an effective and timely fashion.

For several years now, I've been on a Tulsa Police Department Media Relations e-mail list. Nearly every morning around 8, I receive an email with subject line "Daily" with an attached PDF file. The PDF consists of a description of significant TPD activity the previous night. Except for the TPD letterhead, the PDF is mainly text. Until recently, the body of the email contained only the name of the media contact of the day. Over the last week or so, they've begun to put the text of the document in the body of the email -- an improvement -- but they still attach the PDF and now they're embedding a 262 KB image of the TPD badge in the email, bloating the size of each email to about 1/2 a megabyte.

There are occasional bulletins, too, like the one I received Thursday night about a special-needs child who had wandered away from his south Tulsa home. The email included a high-resolution photo of the boy and a description.

The TPD's use of email seems to assume an old-media approach to disseminating information to the public: The assignment editor at the newspaper, TV station, or radio station receives the email, prints off the attachment, and hands it off to a reporter, who follows up with the TPD media relations officer of the day to prepare a story for broadcast that night or the next day's paper.

Let me use Thursday's missing-boy story as an example of how TPD's approach slows down the dissemination of information they want to convey to the public.

As soon as I saw the email on Thursday evening and decided to help get out the word, I saved the attached photo to my hard drive, uploaded it to my blog database (using the blog software's capability to produce a smaller version that would fit the blog format -- I might also have edited it myself), created a new blog entry with the text from the TPD email, and then published it. I went through all these steps mainly so I could have a link to detailed information that I could then post to Twitter and Facebook. Shortly after I got all this done -- within 30 minutes of TPD sending the email -- I learned that the boy had been found, and so I updated the blog entry and sent out the news on Twitter and Facebook. Had there been a blog entry to which I could have linked, I could have pushed the information out to my blog readers and social networks within a minute or two of seeing the email.

To the extent that word got out to the public, TPD was dependent on media outlets to be paying attention at 8 pm on a Thursday evening. There's a better way that would allow TPD to reach more citizens more quickly and more directly. Here's the way the missing-boy story could have been handled:

• TPD posts the photo of the boy, description, and details of the disappearance on the Tulsa Police Department blog.
• TPD uses its @tulsapolice Twitter account to send a bulletin with a link to the blog entry with all the details. The link should be shortened with is.gd or a self-hosted link shortener, so that more of the maximum 140 characters are available to explain what's up. As an example, here's my tweet from Thursday night:

  9 yr old special-needs child missing near 101st and Yale #tulsa http://is.gd/8aKXR Tulsa tweeps please RT

  (If such info were available via @tulsapolice, I'd have those tweets sent to my phone, so that I'd see them ASAP. I'm sure many other Tulsans would do the same.
• TPD sends a direct link (not a shortened one) via its Facebook fan page, and uses the boy's photo as the link summary thumbnail. The accompanying text should still be brief, but Facebook allows a bit more room to explain the situation.
• TPD sends an email to its media list with the text of the blog entry, a small version of the photo, and a link back to the blog entry. If a media outlet needed a high-res version of the photo, they could obtain it at the relevant blog entry.

The media and the public then would help TPD spread the word:

• Twitter followers of @tulsapolice retweet the link to the TPD blog entry. All it takes is a single click to spread the message.
• Facebook fans of Tulsa Police Department share the link to the TPD blog entry with their Facebook friends.
• Bloggers post info online with link to TPD blog entry, hot-linking photo from TPD site.
• Traditional media posts breaking news online (with a link to TPD blog entry), follows up with TPD for news story for later broadcast or publication.

Under this approach, when the boy was found, TPD would have posted an update at the top of the same blog entry, and then sent that same link to that blog entry back out via Twitter, Facebook, and email, with the accompanying message that the boy had been found. By putting the updated info on the same blog entry, someone reading the alert later and following the link would immediately see the latest developments.

(It should go without saying, but every such email and blog entry should include day, month, and year in the body of the text, to prevent out-of-date information circulating forever as an emailed urban legend.)

It's March 6, 2010, Bob Wills's 105th birthday, and there's a celebration tonight at Cain's Ballroom, the legendary dance hall that was home to his daily radio show and twice-weekly dances. Headlining tonight's event are Bob's own Texas Playboys, led by Leon Rausch and Tommy Allsup, both of whom have been associated with the band for over 50 years. Tulsa's Round-Up Boys and Oklahoma Stomp, a group of talented young western swing musicians, are the opening acts. Doors open at 6:30, the show starts at 7:00 and tickets are $16 + fees.

This is always a great show. Any country band could play a Bob Wills tune, but it's another thing altogether to swing the music the way he did. In extending the tradition of the Texas Playboys into the 21st century, Leon Rausch brings together the best western swing musicians around, sidemen who can take a chorus and turn it into a showstopping improvisation. As I wrote in a salute from a few years ago:

Rausch says that "these boys are the very best western swing musicians in the business," and I'll vouch for that. You can tell the difference between competent players who reproduce great improvisations from the past, and those who really are creating in the moment. Their playing at last year's celebration was inspired, drawing energy from the music, from the audience, and from each other.

A bit of Saturday serendipity: If you know and love the music of The Platters, you'll love this send-up by country artist Roy Clark, who attempts, almost single-voicedly, to recreate the full sound of the doo-wop group's hit "The Great Pretender." It's fun to hear what Clark does with the distinctive vocal mannerisms of Platters' lead singer Tony Williams:

TPD Update: "Our missing child has been located at 9600 S. Riverside Drive. The child was cold but otherwise will be ok. Thank you for your assistance."

A bulletin from the Tulsa Police Department, March 4, 2010, 8:06 p.m.:

On March 4 at about 4:30 PM, officers were notified of a nine year old low functioning special needs child that had walked away from his home in the 9200 block of South Lakewood Ave. The victim was last seen in the 4700 block of east 101st st. The child was last seen wearing a long sleeved lime green shirt with khaki stripes, khaki pants and black New Balance shoes. The victim is 4'09 with light brown hair. With temperatures expected below freezing it is extremely important that the child be located. Please call 911 if you see this child!

Tulsa Police Media Relations
www.tulsapolice.org
tpdnews@cityoftulsa.org

James Howard Kunstler, the author of provocative books on urban design, architecture, and the economy (The Geography of Nowhere, The Long Emergency, World Made by Hand), has named the new building for Clinton Middle School, on W. 41st St. in Tulsa's Red Fork neighborhood, as his "Eyesore of the Month":

Presenting the new Clinton Middle School, Tulsa, Oklahoma -- a building that expresses to perfection our current social consensus about the meaning of education.

Read for yourself his description of the new building, accompanied by photos, and scroll to the bottom of the page to click through his list of previous Eyesores of the Month. It's harsh but fair.

(Be aware that, although he doesn't have any rude words on that particular page, Kunstler is fairly free with expletives on other pages on the site.)

On his Historic Tulsa blog, Bill Miller has photos of the old Clinton Middle School as the demolition process was underway. Even in its final hours, the old school retained its dignity. There's a pre-demolition close-up picture of the main entry on the Webster High School class of '76 website. A Facebook group called "I went to the ORIGINAL Clinton Middle School" has a collection of photos from the final tour of the old Clinton Middle School.